Tactus Technology has introduced a new way to interact with your phone: The Tactus Tactile Layer. This morphing layer of magic goo [paraphrasing] can raise up to form actual tactile buttons on your device, and disappear again when not needed. Previously, the only form of realistic haptic feedback available to touch devices was to have the device vibrate when a touch event occurred, but no longer.
As seen in the demo video, the main use case for this would be for keyboards and the dialer touch pad. It will make it easier for users to make the jump to a touch device from a Blackberry or other device with a physical keyboard or press buttons, as the interaction will be similar.
However, once the technology is really adopted and finely tuned so that software developers are able to access it, we should see this popping up in games for buttons and other actions, and even on the mobile web. Just think of what this could do for user experience and accessibility! Navigation controls, form elements, even converting a simple text paragraph into Braille! I’m getting excited just imagining the possibilities!
The Tactus Tactile Layer could be the next evolution of touch display interaction. Jump to the comments and let me know what you think about it.
Sources:
[Video] Touch Display Technology Changes How You Feel About HCI
by Zach Handing on January 9th, 2013 | ~ minute read
